As the year turns and resolutions are made and abandoned, happily The Burlington Magazine continues to deliver exceptional art history. This month’s Magazine features fascinating articles that focus on Italian and Portuguese paintings and drawings.
Angelamaria Aceto presents a new analysis of two drawings by Raphael in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which are connected with the artist’s ‘Virgin and Child with a book’ in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. This research provides intriguing evidence of Raphael’s earliest encounters with Florentine art. Alexander Collins reassesses a drawing in the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, which is by Vieira Lusitano and can be associated with the decoration of the Church of Menino Deus in Lisbon.
Exhibitions reviewed include ‘Art and War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries’ by Elizabeth Cleland, ‘Guercino e i Ludovisi a Roma’ by David. M. Stone, and ‘IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism’ by David Hopkins. An impressively wide range of new books being assessed range from a study of the restored objects and furnishings from Notre-Dame, Paris by Delphine Bastet, to research on art and Modernism in Socialist China by Angie Baecker. A forensic analysis of the goldsmiths’ trade in Elizabethan and Stuart London is praised by Timothy Schroder.